OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Investigating the Use of Productive Failure as a Design Paradigm for Learning Introductory Python Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Productive Failure (PF) is a learning approach where students initially tackle novel problems targeting concepts they have not yet learned, followed by a consolidation phase where these concepts are taught. Recent application in STEM disciplines suggests that PF can help learners develop more robust conceptual knowledge. However, empirical validation of PF for programming education remains under-explored. In this paper, we investigate the use of PF to teach Python lists to undergraduate students with limited prior programming experience. We designed a novel PF-based learning activity that incorporated the unobtrusive collection of real-time heart-rate data from consumer-grade wearable sensors. This sensor data was used both to make the learning activity engaging and to infer cognitive load. We evaluated our approach with 20 participants, half of whom were taught Python concepts using Direct Instruction (DI), and the other half with PF. We found that although there was no difference in initial learning outcomes between the groups, students who followed the PF approach showed better knowledge retention and performance on delayed but similar tasks. In addition, physiological measurements indicated that these students also exhibited a larger decrease in cognitive load during their tasks after instruction. Our findings suggest that PF-based approaches may lead to more robust learning, and that future work should investigate similar activities at scale across a range of concepts.
BeautyBank: Encoding Facial Makeup in Latent Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The advancement of makeup transfer, editing, and image encoding has demonstrated their effectiveness and superior quality. However, existing makeup works primarily focus on low-dimensional features such as color distributions and patterns, limiting their versatillity across a wide range of makeup applications. Futhermore, existing high-dimensional latent encoding methods mainly target global features such as structure and style, and are less effective for tasks that require detailed attention to local color and pattern features of makeup. To overcome these limitations, we propose BeautyBank, a novel makeup encoder that disentangles pattern features of bare and makeup faces. Our method encodes makeup features into a high-dimensional space, preserving essential details necessary for makeup reconstruction and broadening the scope of potential makeup research applications. We also propose a Progressive Makeup Tuning (PMT) strategy, specifically designed to enhance the preservation of detailed makeup features while preventing the inclusion of irrelevant attributes. We further explore novel makeup applications, including facial image generation with makeup injection and makeup similarity measure. Extensive empirical experiments validate that our method offers superior task adaptability and holds significant potential for widespread application in various makeup-related fields. Furthermore, to address the lack of large-scale, high-quality paired makeup datasets in the field, we constructed the Bare-Makeup Synthesis Dataset (BMS), comprising 324,000 pairs of 512x512 pixel images of bare and makeup-enhanced faces.
gDist: Efficient Distance Computation between 3D Meshes on GPU
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Computing maximum/minimum distances between 3D meshes is crucial for various applications, i.e., robotics, CAD, VR/AR, etc. In this work, we introduce a highly parallel algorithm (gDist) optimized for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which is capable of computing the distance between two meshes with over 15 million triangles in less than 0.4 milliseconds (Fig. 1). By testing on benchmarks with varying characteristics, the algorithm achieves remarkable speedups over prior CPU-based and GPU-based algorithms on a commodity GPU (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090). Notably, the algorithm consistently maintains high-speed performance, even in challenging scenarios that pose difficulties for prior algorithms.
Progressive Generalization Risk Reduction for Data-Efficient Causal Effect Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Causal effect estimation (CEE) provides a crucial tool for predicting the unobserved counterfactual outcome for an entity. As CEE relaxes the requirement for ``perfect'' counterfactual samples (e.g., patients with identical attributes and only differ in treatments received) that are impractical to obtain and can instead operate on observational data, it is usually used in high-stake domains like medical treatment effect prediction. Nevertheless, in those high-stake domains, gathering a decently sized, fully labelled observational dataset remains challenging due to hurdles associated with costs, ethics, expertise and time needed, etc., of which medical treatment surveys are a typical example. Consequently, if the training dataset is small in scale, low generalization risks can hardly be achieved on any CEE algorithms. Unlike existing CEE methods that assume the constant availability of a dataset with abundant samples, in this paper, we study a more realistic CEE setting where the labelled data samples are scarce at the beginning, while more can be gradually acquired over the course of training -- assuredly under a limited budget considering their expensive nature. Then, the problem naturally comes down to actively selecting the best possible samples to be labelled, e.g., identifying the next subset of patients to conduct the treatment survey. However, acquiring quality data for reducing the CEE risk under limited labelling budgets remains under-explored until now. To fill the gap, we theoretically analyse the generalization risk from an intriguing perspective of progressively shrinking its upper bound, and develop a principled label acquisition pipeline exclusively for CEE tasks. With our analysis, we propose the Model Agnostic Causal Active Learning (MACAL) algorithm for batch-wise label acquisition, which aims to reduce both the CEE model's uncertainty and the post-acquisition ...
Massively Parallel Maximum Coverage Revisited
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study the maximum set coverage problem in the massively parallel model. In this setting, $m$ sets that are subsets of a universe of $n$ elements are distributed among $m$ machines. In each round, these machines can communicate with each other, subject to the memory constraint that no machine may use more than $\tilde{O}(n)$ memory. The objective is to find the $k$ sets whose coverage is maximized. We consider the regime where $k = Ω(m)$, $m = O(n)$, and each machine has $\tilde{O}(n)$ memory. Maximum coverage is a special case of the submodular maximization problem subject to a cardinality constraint. This problem can be approximated to within a $1-1/e$ factor using the greedy algorithm, but this approach is not directly applicable to parallel and distributed models. When $k = Ω(m)$, to obtain a $1-1/e-ε$ approximation, previous work either requires $\tilde{O}(mn)$ memory per machine which is not interesting compared to the trivial algorithm that sends the entire input to a single machine, or requires $2^{O(1/ε)} n$ memory per machine which is prohibitively expensive even for a moderately small value $ε$. Our result is a randomized $(1-1/e-ε)$-approximation algorithm that uses $O(1/ε^3 \cdot \log m \cdot (\log (1/ε) + \log m))$ rounds. Our algorithm involves solving a slightly transformed linear program of the maximum coverage problem using the multiplicative weights update method, classic techniques in parallel computing such as parallel prefix, and various combinatorial arguments.
On the compressiveness of the Burrows-Wheeler transform
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2024
Year: 2024

The Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) is a reversible transform that converts a string $w$ into another string $\mathsf{BWT}(w)$. The size of the run-length encoded BWT (RLBWT) can be interpreted as a measure of repetitiveness in the class of representations called dictionary compression which are essentially representations based on copy and paste operations. In this paper, we shed new light on the compressiveness of BWT and the bijective BWT (BBWT). We first extend previous results on the relations of their run-length compressed sizes $r$ and $r_B$. We also show that the so-called ``clustering effect'' of BWT and BBWT can be captured by measures other than empirical entropy or run-length encoding. In particular, we show that BWT and BBWT do not increase the repetitiveness of the string with respect to various measures based on dictionary compression by more than a polylogarithmic factor. Furthermore, we show that there exists an infinite family of strings that are maximally incompressible by any dictionary compression measure, but become very compressible after applying BBWT. An interesting implication of this result is that it is possible to transcend dictionary compression in some cases by simply applying BBWT before applying dictionary compression.
Lorentz: Learned SKU Recommendation Using Profile Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Cloud operators have expanded their service offerings, known as Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), to accommodate diverse demands, resulting in increased complexity for customers to select appropriate configurations. In a studied system, only 43% of the resource capacity was correctly chosen. Automated solutions addressing this issue often require enriched data, such as workload traces, which are unavailable for new services. However, telemetry from existing users and customer satisfaction feedback provide valuable insights for understanding customer needs and improving provisioning recommendations. This paper introduces Lorentz, an intelligent SKU recommender for provisioning compute resources without relying on workload traces. Lorentz uses customer profile data to forecast resource capacities for new users by profiling existing ones. It also incorporates a continuous feedback loop to refine recommendations based on customer performance versus cost preferences inferred from satisfaction signals. Validated with production data from Azure PostgreSQL DB, Lorentz achieves over 60% slack reduction without increasing throttling compared to user selections and existing defaults. Evaluations with synthetic data demonstrate Lorentz's ability to iteratively learn user preferences with high accuracy.
Enhancing Decision Transformer with Diffusion-Based Trajectory Branch Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Decision Transformer (DT) can learn effective policy from offline datasets by converting the offline reinforcement learning (RL) into a supervised sequence modeling task, where the trajectory elements are generated auto-regressively conditioned on the return-to-go (RTG).However, the sequence modeling learning approach tends to learn policies that converge on the sub-optimal trajectories within the dataset, for lack of bridging data to move to better trajectories, even if the condition is set to the highest RTG.To address this issue, we introduce Diffusion-Based Trajectory Branch Generation (BG), which expands the trajectories of the dataset with branches generated by a diffusion model.The trajectory branch is generated based on the segment of the trajectory within the dataset, and leads to trajectories with higher returns.We concatenate the generated branch with the trajectory segment as an expansion of the trajectory.After expanding, DT has more opportunities to learn policies to move to better trajectories, preventing it from converging to the sub-optimal trajectories.Empirically, after processing with BG, DT outperforms state-of-the-art sequence modeling methods on D4RL benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of adding branches to the dataset without further modifications.
InstruGen: Automatic Instruction Generation for Vision-and-Language Navigation Via Large Multimodal Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recent research on Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) indicates that agents suffer from poor generalization in unseen environments due to the lack of realistic training environments and high-quality path-instruction pairs. Most existing methods for constructing realistic navigation scenes have high costs, and the extension of instructions mainly relies on predefined templates or rules, lacking adaptability. To alleviate the issue, we propose InstruGen, a VLN path-instruction pairs generation paradigm. Specifically, we use YouTube house tour videos as realistic navigation scenes and leverage the powerful visual understanding and generation abilities of large multimodal models (LMMs) to automatically generate diverse and high-quality VLN path-instruction pairs. Our method generates navigation instructions with different granularities and achieves fine-grained alignment between instructions and visual observations, which was difficult to achieve with previous methods. Additionally, we design a multi-stage verification mechanism to reduce hallucinations and inconsistency of LMMs. Experimental results demonstrate that agents trained with path-instruction pairs generated by InstruGen achieves state-of-the-art performance on the R2R and RxR benchmarks, particularly in unseen environments. Code is available at https://github.com/yanyu0526/InstruGen.
Causal Effect of Group Diversity on Redundancy and Coverage in Peer-Reviewing
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

A large host of scientific journals and conferences solicit peer reviews from multiple reviewers for the same submission, aiming to gather a broader range of perspectives and mitigate individual biases. In this work, we reflect on the role of diversity in the slate of reviewers assigned to evaluate a submitted paper as a factor in diversifying perspectives and improving the utility of the peer-review process. We propose two measures for assessing review utility: review coverage -- reviews should cover most contents of the paper -- and review redundancy -- reviews should add information not already present in other reviews. We hypothesize that reviews from diverse reviewers will exhibit high coverage and low redundancy. We conduct a causal study of different measures of reviewer diversity on review coverage and redundancy using observational data from a peer-reviewed conference with approximately 5,000 submitted papers. Our study reveals disparate effects of different diversity measures on review coverage and redundancy. Our study finds that assigning a group of reviewers that are topically diverse, have different seniority levels, or have distinct publication networks leads to broader coverage of the paper or review criteria, but we find no evidence of an increase in coverage for reviewer slates with reviewers from diverse organizations or geographical locations. Reviewers from different organizations, seniority levels, topics, or publications networks (all except geographical diversity) lead to a decrease in redundancy in reviews. Furthermore, publication network-based diversity alone also helps bring in varying perspectives (that is, low redundancy), even within specific review criteria. Our study adopts a group decision-making perspective for reviewer assignments in peer review and suggests dimensions of diversity that can help guide the reviewer assignment process.
Robust Markov Decision Processes: A Place Where AI and Formal Methods Meet
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a standard model for sequential decision-making problems and are widely used across many scientific areas, including formal methods and artificial intelligence (AI). MDPs do, however, come with the restrictive assumption that the transition probabilities need to be precisely known. Robust MDPs (RMDPs) overcome this assumption by instead defining the transition probabilities to belong to some uncertainty set. We present a gentle survey on RMDPs, providing a tutorial covering their fundamentals. In particular, we discuss RMDP semantics and how to solve them by extending standard MDP methods such as value iteration and policy iteration. We also discuss how RMDPs relate to other models and how they are used in several contexts, including reinforcement learning and abstraction techniques. We conclude with some challenges for future work on RMDPs.
MVLight: Relightable Text-to-3D Generation via Light-conditioned Multi-View Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation, building on the success of high-performance text-to-image generative models, have made it possible to create imaginative and richly textured 3D objects from textual descriptions. However, a key challenge remains in effectively decoupling light-independent and lighting-dependent components to enhance the quality of generated 3D models and their relighting performance. In this paper, we present MVLight, a novel light-conditioned multi-view diffusion model that explicitly integrates lighting conditions directly into the generation process. This enables the model to synthesize high-quality images that faithfully reflect the specified lighting environment across multiple camera views. By leveraging this capability to Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), we can effectively synthesize 3D models with improved geometric precision and relighting capabilities. We validate the effectiveness of MVLight through extensive experiments and a user study.
Look a Group at Once: Multi-Slide Modeling for Survival Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Survival prediction is a critical task in pathology. In clinical practice, pathologists often examine multiple cases, leveraging a broader spectrum of cancer phenotypes to enhance pathological assessment. Despite significant advancements in deep learning, current solutions typically model each slide as a sample, struggling to effectively capture comparable and slide-agnostic pathological features. In this paper, we introduce GroupMIL, a novel framework inspired by the clinical practice of collective analysis, which models multiple slides as a single sample and organizes groups of patches and slides sequentially to capture cross-slide prognostic features. We also present GPAMamba, a model designed to facilitate intra- and inter-slide feature interactions, effectively capturing local micro-environmental characteristics within slide-level graphs while uncovering essential prognostic patterns across an extended patch sequence within the group framework. Furthermore, we develop a dual-head predictor that delivers comprehensive survival risk and probability assessments for each patient. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across five datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas.
LSRAM: A Lightweight Autoscaling and SLO Resource Allocation Framework for Microservices Based on Gradient Descent
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Microservices architecture has become the dominant architecture in cloud computing paradigm with its advantages of facilitating development, deployment, modularity and scalability. The workflow of microservices architecture is transparent to the users, who are concerned with the quality of service (QoS). Taking Service Level Objective (SLO) as an important indicator of system resource scaling can effectively ensure user's QoS, but how to quickly allocate end-to-end SLOs to each microservice in a complete service so that it can obtain the optimal SLO resource allocation scheme is still a challenging problem. Existing microservice autoscaling frameworks based on SLO resources often have heavy and complex models that demand substantial time and computational resources to get a suitable resource allocation scheme. Moreover, when the system environment or microservice application changes, these methods require significant time and resources for model retraining. In this paper, we propose LSRAM, a lightweight SLO resource allocation management framework based on the gradient descent method to overcome the limitation of existing methods in terms of heavy model, time-consuming, poor scalability, and difficulty in retraining. LSRAM has two stages: at stage one, the lightweight SLO resource allocation model from LSRAM can quickly compute the appropriate SLO resources for each microservice; at stage two, LSRAM's SLO resource update model enables the entire framework to quickly adapt to changes in the cluster environment (e.g. load and applications). Additionally, LSRAM can effectively handle bursty traffic and highly fluctuating load application scenarios. Compared to state-of-the-art SLO allocation frameworks, LSRAM not only guarantees users' QoS but also reduces resource usage by 17%.
Alien Recombination: Exploring Concept Blends Beyond Human Cognitive Availability in Visual Art
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

While AI models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in constrained domains like game strategy, their potential for genuine creativity in open-ended domains like art remains debated. We explore this question by examining how AI can transcend human cognitive limitations in visual art creation. Our research hypothesizes that visual art contains a vast unexplored space of conceptual combinations, constrained not by inherent incompatibility, but by cognitive limitations imposed by artists' cultural, temporal, geographical and social contexts. To test this hypothesis, we present the Alien Recombination method, a novel approach utilizing fine-tuned large language models to identify and generate concept combinations that lie beyond human cognitive availability. The system models and deliberately counteracts human availability bias, the tendency to rely on immediately accessible examples, to discover novel artistic combinations. This system not only produces combinations that have never been attempted before within our dataset but also identifies and generates combinations that are cognitively unavailable to all artists in the domain. Furthermore, we translate these combinations into visual representations, enabling the exploration of subjective perceptions of novelty. Our findings suggest that cognitive unavailability is a promising metric for optimizing artistic novelty, outperforming merely temperature scaling without additional evaluation criteria. This approach uses generative models to connect previously unconnected ideas, providing new insight into the potential of framing AI-driven creativity as a combinatorial problem.
SignEye: Traffic Sign Interpretation from Vehicle First-Person View
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Traffic signs play a key role in assisting autonomous driving systems (ADS) by enabling the assessment of vehicle behavior in compliance with traffic regulations and providing navigation instructions. However, current works are limited to basic sign understanding without considering the egocentric vehicle's spatial position, which fails to support further regulation assessment and direction navigation. Following the above issues, we introduce a new task: traffic sign interpretation from the vehicle's first-person view, referred to as TSI-FPV. Meanwhile, we develop a traffic guidance assistant (TGA) scenario application to re-explore the role of traffic signs in ADS as a complement to popular autonomous technologies (such as obstacle perception). Notably, TGA is not a replacement for electronic map navigation; rather, TGA can be an automatic tool for updating it and complementing it in situations such as offline conditions or temporary sign adjustments. Lastly, a spatial and semantic logic-aware stepwise reasoning pipeline (SignEye) is constructed to achieve the TSI-FPV and TGA, and an application-specific dataset (Traffic-CN) is built. Experiments show that TSI-FPV and TGA are achievable via our SignEye trained on Traffic-CN. The results also demonstrate that the TGA can provide complementary information to ADS beyond existing popular autonomous technologies.